


Not That It Matters (But It Is Important)

by allback2mine



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Affection, Demisexuality, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hair Brushing, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mind Palace, Pining, Romance, Slow Build, Storms, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-09 09:17:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3244328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allback2mine/pseuds/allback2mine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is struggling. John helps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A small word of warning: although I have an outline this is still very much a work in progress. I'm going to try to post weekly as I haven't written for a while and need goals, dammit. If anyone actually reads this, please bear with me. I promise to do my best for you.
> 
> I will add more tags as they become appropriate.

It’s midnight on the last Tuesday in January and London is bitterly cold. A gale howls through the city, lashing icy rain against the windows of 221B Baker Street. Inside, Sherlock Holmes is rigidly horizontal on his sofa, his back to the darkened sitting room. His eyes are squeezed shut, his hands cover his ears and he has yanked his dressing gown whip tight around his ribs. 

There is no fire in the hearth, just yesterday’s cold ashes, slightly damp now from the rain spattering down the chimney. The heating, Sherlock notes, inexplicably turned itself off an hour ago. He is now very cold but is ignoring it. Even a metabolism as ferocious as his cannot warm a body lying almost motionless, protected from the cold air by nothing but thin layers of cotton and silk. An attentive observer would notice that a minute shiver is affecting his entire frame, but there is no observer, attentive or otherwise. Neither does it come to the attention of Sherlock himself, who pays no heed whatsoever to his body’s distress.

The wind is groaning down the chimney, hammering against the walls and rattling the sashes. Every now and then it abates, leaving in its wake the equally unbearable din made by the antiquated fridge and the downstairs burble of Radio 4, its volume tailored to the 77-year-old ears of a herbally-soothed landlady. Sherlock presses his palms more tightly to his head. He is busy. He does not need these constant interruptions.

Exactly three different types of illumination are assailing him; his back is turned, his eyes are closed but even then he knows they are there. It is within his power to eliminate all of them if only he were inclined to move from the sofa, which he is not. First of all the open curtains are allowing unpleasant rectangles of electric streetlight to leak into the sitting room. Secondly, those same curtains are letting flares of car headlights stab into his consciousness. Thirdly, a hateful smattering of overly bright multicoloured pinpricks glow out from the assortment of laptops and mobiles that have been strewn about the room and left to charge. Sherlock set them out himself earlier in the day, before he lay down and completely lost interest in them. 

There are lamps in the sitting room but they are all off. This is because Sherlock has not turned them on, because when he lay down it was quite some time ago and still daylight outside. Lamps were unnecessary. This was despite the daylight in question being a pretty poor excuse, in all honesty. A sickly, grey sort of short-lived daylight, as befits the excruciating runt of a day Sherlock has just suffered through.

Sherlock pulls free the hand that was sandwiched between cushion and right ear and claps it over his eyes instead. _Go away_.

Behind his eyelids Sherlock is tearing through the ground floor of his mind palace, banging closed the shutters on window after window after window. A storm has begun to rage outside and he must see to it that the structure is adequately fortified against the battering it is about to receive. 

He runs down to the cellar to check for flooding and tugs his hair in anguish at what he finds: absolutely pure, frigid water, almost blue under the fluorescent light, already trickling down the walls and seeping in under the whitewashed brick, soaking into the barrels and the packing crates and the wine racks. Thin skins of ice form and fracture as the water licks across the floor. 

He heaves a few things out of harm’s way: a box of research notes concerning instances of ricin poisoning in the Greater London area between 1956 and 1976; six wine bottles each containing an occasion on which he was drunk in the presence of one or more Metropolitan Police officers; a plastic incubator full of insulting but not as yet fully thought through similes for Mycroft’s fat face. The work is exhausting: he simply cannot rearrange the contents of the cellar with sufficient speed to avoid the rising water. What good to him would they be anyway, if stored in chaos?

Shoes and trouser hems now sodden, he races back up to the ground floor where he sees rainwater seeping in under the shutters. He knows he has sandbags somewhere and tries to recall where he put them. Twisting around, coattails flying he scans each door but he cannot remember. Where are they? He knew the storm was coming, has been able to feel the change in pressure for days and days now, felt it in his impatience and his inability to finish even so much as a monograph and in his whole nights awake for cases he knows, he _knows_ are only barely a three. He felt it coming and laid in a good supply of sandbags so that he’d be calmly prepared when the storm finally came.

He runs into the kitchen, skitters across the chessboard floor over to the pantry and throws open the door. There’s very little within, just small stacks of takeaway menus with the names of major European cities pinned to the edges of the shelves on which they sit. Not a sandbag to be seen.

A violent slam of wind hits the palace’s southeastern wall and upstairs Sherlock hears one of the bedroom windows smash.

***

John likes Mike. He likes him a lot, actually, and he thoroughly enjoys having a pint with him now and again. But for all Mike’s amiable charms John is not sure that his company is really an adequate trade-off for getting battered by the deluge of the fucking decade. 

Making his only very mildly plastered way home in the wind and the rain and the cold he finds every night bus rammed and every taxi sporting an unlit sign and a smug bastard keeping dry in the back. The short and usually fairly pleasant walk back from the pub is enough to soak him utterly to the skin. His shoes squelch and his jeans cling to his legs, chafing painfully as he walks. He is absolutely freezing in his increasingly sodden clothes.

As he nears home he breaks in to a slight run, noting from a distance that the upper windows are all in darkness. He knows better than to think that that means Sherlock is either in bed or out, and hopes that if he is conscious and just thinking or napping or sulking he has at least had the decency to put the heating back on when the timer turned it off at eleven. He wrestles his key out, opens the door and staggers inside.

Out of the relentless roar of the wind and rain the hall is blessedly quiet. John catches his breath for a moment and pushes his dripping hair back from his face, slaking the droplets off his fingers as he heads upstairs to the flat.


	2. Chapter 2

At the slam of the front door Sherlock’s eyes flick open. For a moment he hopes that John has remembered to drag the sandbag back into place behind him, then he recalls that it is in fact his other domain that is in danger of flooding. Feeling wretched he scrubs his hands down his face. All that time, he thinks. All that time in the sun, with cases and clients and chases and escapes. All that time with John and still, still he failed to make adequate provision for the winter when the storms and the floods and the ice set in. They always set in, he could set his watch by it. Always. 

Lazy, complacent fool. Get back to work. 

Sherlock sprints up the Palace’s central staircase, flying over the steps in twos.

‘Evening Sherlock.’

Sherlock fumbles a step and grabs the bannister, opens his eyes. Back on the sofa and thoroughly disoriented, he twists around to look over his shoulder.

‘John.’ He peers at the silhouette in the doorway, then frowns. ‘John, you’re soaked.’

‘Yes. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s a minor tempest going on outside.’

‘Oh, that. Yes.’

He turns his back again, closes his eyes and burrows further into the cushions. Closes his hand around the bannister and heaves...

‘Yes, that.’ John says, flicking the kitchen light on and sitting down. 

Sherlock sighs. The broken Palace window will have to wait until John’s gone to bed, or at least left the room, and Sherlock will just have to deal with the consequences of his neglect. This is exactly the way so much maintenance work piles up. John is a distraction. Sherlock wonders, given that he used to consider his backbone made of surgical steel, where all his willpower went.

He turns over and watches as John peels off his dripping jacket and carefully hangs it over the back of the kitchen chair, then leans forward and starts trying to untie his wet shoelaces with fingers frozen numb. 

‘Don’t worry about it though,’ he continues. ‘Don’t, you know, shut the curtains or stick the heating back on or build a fire or anything.’

‘Mmm.’

John seems quite content as he grumbles away at Sherlock. It is one of his favourite pastimes, after all. Despite the drenching he’s received, his mood is apparently good. He has clearly had an enjoyable evening, and is on the mellower side of inebriated. 

Now that John’s removed his jacket, Sherlock can see that his jumper (also sodden where the seams and fastenings of the jacket lay) is dark blue and a bit worn, coming from what Sherlock considers the bottom end of the middle tier of John’s wardrobe; that is, something John considers nice enough to go out in but not nice enough to go out with a woman in. Male company then.

John’s voice is slightly raised, like he’s spent the past few hours shouting over music. Unlikely to be a club as John dislikes dancing in public and says club clientele make him feel old. Therefore, a pub. Had he been there with Army mates he’d be much, much drunker so that leaves Stamford or Lestrade. 

Lestrade sent Sherlock a text from a very boring crime scene not an hour ago, so he is ruled out for this evening and doubtless several more to come. Step forward then, Mike Stamford.

Sherlock is pleased to observe, oh _interesting_ , that John has something for him in the inside pocket of his jacket (judging by his downcast eyes and unusually twitchy right thumb). It’ll be an offprint of a journal article recently published by one of Stamford’s colleagues, promised to him a week ago. Good. A deduction to impress John plus something new to read and probably enjoy demolishing afterwards, all in one neat package. Given the day he’s had and the mire of boredom from which he cannot seem currently to escape Sherlock will take what he can get when it comes to entertainment. He considers himself at this moment the least choosey of beggars.

John, having won the war against his shoelaces, is looking at him with a slightly loosened gaze.

‘Aren’t you cold, lying in the dark like that? It’s brass monkeys out there, I am freezing.’

Deductions that begin as non-sequiturs always seem to elicit the most pleasingly enthusiastic responses from John, so Sherlock draws breath to begin his rather elegant unearthing of the offprint...

John slaps his knees purposefully. 

‘Right. I’m going to have a bath to warm up.’ He rises from the chair. ‘Stick the kettle on will you?’

He squelches off down the hall and Sherlock hears the bathroom door slam, followed by the hiss of the taps. An irritating, irregular clicking starts up as hot water surges through the cold pipes. 

With all the bad grace he can muster he squirms over onto his other side, back to the room once more. There is absolutely no bloody way in hell that he is putting the kettle on. 

He closes his eyes again and finds himself immediately back in the Palace, already in the bedroom and listening to the storm rage outside. Directly in front of him is the broken pane of glass. All the other windows are neatly sandbagged. He looks down at the hammer, nails and perfectly-sized piece of plywood in his hands.

***

John hangs his jumper on the back of the bathroom door and eases off his saturated jeans. His legs feel numb, the skin lividly pink where the wet material has rubbed them. Steam from the bath is already warming the room nicely as he takes off the the rest of his clothes and drops them into a neat pile on the floor. He is painfully cold, so he steps into the bath before it’s even finished filling and eases himself down into the hot water, gritting his teeth as his chilled skin gets accustomed to the heat.

There are bottles clustered on the corners of the bath. A grand total of one of them belongs to John: Original Source Three-in-One Mint Shower Gel and Conditioning Shampoo, and jolly nice it is too thank you very much. Saves time in the shower as well as being pleasantly tingly on the undercarriage. All the other bottles belong to Sherlock. There are a variety of shapes and sizes, most of which have austere, over-designed labels and look more like they came from a laboratory than from Boots. He notices the words ‘muscle soak’ on one of them and thinks that sounds just the ticket. 

Glancing towards the door in case Sherlock’s turned to smoke and crept in underneath it, he picks the bottle up, unscrews the lid and has a tentative sniff. A nice lavendery sort of smell wafts up and he wonders if Sherlock would mind if he pinched a bit. Hmm. Sherlock would mind. John is fairly sure that he would definitely mind. So the question is really, does John mind that Sherlock would mind? And the answer is not really, no. Not much at all. In fact, John quite likes to work a few small, inoffensive ways of annoying Sherlock into his day. It’s cheap entertainment. 

In it goes, just a drop. It does smell very nice indeed and John lies back in his bath, pretty pleased with his lot actually. His lot being still a bit drunk, and delighted that the feeling seems to be coming back to his toes.


	3. Chapter 3

The lingering effects of a few pints plus the warm, comfortable feeling of a recent bath have put John in a pretty cheery mood, especially considering how late it is. Up in his room he layers on soft pyjamas, dressing gown and, hoping that Sherlock won’t notice and take the piss, a very thick pair of multicoloured socks that Mrs Hudson knitted him for Christmas.

Now that he’s higher up in the house he can really hear the battering the roof is taking from the storm. He hopes all the old tiles are secure. There’s a little trapdoor that leads out from the attic onto the roof, and he wonders if Mrs H will ask him to go out and check everything’s still in one piece in the morning. He’s done that before. Maybe he’ll offer; that would be the gentlemanly thing to do. He’s too awake to go straight to bed; he’ll go downstairs and have that late cup of tea instead, maybe see if Sherlock wants one. He looked cold. Still thinking about the logistics of roof clambering he makes his way downstairs. 

John’s absence has allowed Sherlock to reenter his Mind Palace. He has patched the broken window pane and assessed the new sandbags at the first floor windows. He is moderately satisfied with his findings. The rainwater is still seeping through to some extent, he can see the hessian of the sacks darkening in patches. They do seem to have stemmed the flow a bit though, which is some help. 

The gale outside is still howling down the chimneys, spattering great clods of wet soot out into the hearths and blowing icy draughts through all the rooms. He looks around in despair. There’s too much for one man to do, what with the chimneys spewing filth everywhere and the windows being pounded in their frames and the cellar flooding and the paucity of sandbags, not that he isn’t honestly grateful for the ones he has but it is becoming painfully obvious that they are too few and too hard come by for the enormity of the job at hand. And the roof! The roof was already compromised last November by the case with the boy, with the false wall and the fingernails and he really should have solved it so very, very much sooner and so who knows what state the roof must be in by now with this storm tearing at it and Sherlock really should, really _should_ implement a thorough and appropriate maintenance schedule for his property, and he curses his abject stupidity for not having done so previously. 

It’s too late now, for this bout at least. Now it’s only a matter of time before the records begin to be corrupted. 

The library will be first, as usual. It’s where he keeps the finer details of absolutely everything and they’re always the first to go. It took so long to dry it out after last time too. He’d had to lay fires in both fireplaces and keep them alight for weeks, slowly drying out the books and periodicals, easing apart their pages. It had been like working with compressed lumps of wet papier mâché at first as he tried to recall and remember and renew, but he managed in the end. He isn’t at all afraid of hard work, it isn’t that. It’s only that it would be dispiriting to have to undertake the same admittedly trying task again so very soon.

He hears John’s footsteps on the stairs, opens his eyes and cranes his neck around to see.

There he is in the doorway. All relaxed with his hair slightly wet at the ends. His bath was a bit hotter than he usually likes and he’s used Sherlock’s favourite Elemis bath soak and he’s not wearing any pants under his pyjamas. Oh. One more deduction than expected. Not that Sherlock’s looked at his... region. He wouldn’t look. He doesn’t need to look, he can tell from the marginal relaxation of John’s left shoulder.

‘Sherlock, didn't you make any... ah, no. Obviously. I’ll put the kettle on.’

John shuffles into the kitchen, picks up the kettle and checks inside. Finding no Sherlock-related foreign objects in there he fills it and turns in on. Then he comes back into the living room, tugging a few old newspapers from Sherlock’s stack of rejects on the way. He kneels down gingerly in front of the fireplace, a bit off balance, and begins pulling the sheets free, twisting them into tight little balls which he piles up neatly in the grate. 

Sherlock watches John work, getting a bit hypnotised by the repetitive actions. Crunch. Twist. Drop. Crunch. Twist. Drop. He is sleepy, after all.

John looks pleasingly compact from this angle, his dressing gown wrapped snugly around his back and his tucked-up legs, the toes of those ridiculous socks Mrs Hudson gave him peeking out from underneath. The very ends of his hair are sticking together in damp little tufts and his ears are still quite pink from the bath. 

Sherlock allows himself just this once to enjoy simply looking at John, without questioning it or trying to make himself stop. He is just very pleased, in this exact moment, to be this close to him. To exist in the vicinity of John.

John’s finished with the newspaper now, and is balancing slender sticks of kindling around the pile of paper he’s made. His movements are precise and efficient. He stands, takes the box of matches from the mantle and strikes one. He touches it to the newspaper, first to a few points at the back and then to a couple at the front, The dry paper ignites well and the fire flares a little as he stands back looking pleased. He waits a minute for the flames to begin snapping at the kindling, then gently adds a couple of small logs. The pleasant flickering light makes the room seem a bit warmer already.

John turns around to face him.

‘Sherlock, are you alright?’

It is impossible to tear his gaze away from the fire.

‘Sherlock?

John is coming over, tentatively as though he’s unsure of his welcome. This tears Sherlock in half slightly.

He considers honesty. _Well, John, the truth is that no, I'm not sure that I am quite alright. I haven’t a case in the last fortnight, or a really properly interesting case in the last three months, or any drugs in the last eight years or a lover in the last eighteen. I cannot move off this sofa. My Mind Palace is freezing and flooding and crumbling around my ears, which is usually a pretty strong indication that something is, or is about to become catastrophically amiss with my brain. All this is contributing to the frankly pathetic state of the poor excuse for a human being you see in front of you, whom a kind man might term ‘melancholic’ or a less kind man, myself for example, ‘in need of a good solid kicking’. Not that it matters. But you’re here, and you’ve lit a fire and you smell of my bath oil and you insist on being kind to me, so there’s that._

John has rounded the coffee table now and is standing right next to the sofa.

‘You’re not alright, are you.’ It is in no way a question.

John looks down at Sherlock and doesn’t look worried, precisely. He looks concerned but he also looks very, very capable. He looks trustworthy and tremendously solid, for all that he’s physically rather small.

Sherlock cannot keep up with himself. Every time John is there his internal circuitry flickers into life a little, just enough to make the absence of that life more keenly felt when... well, when John’s absence is more keenly felt.


	4. Chapter 4

‘My head hurts.’ 

John eyes Sherlock sceptically. 

‘It does. My head hurts. That’s why I’m lying here. Resting.’

‘That’s all it is? You’re sure?’ 

‘Yes.’

‘Have you taken anything for it? Paracetamol?’

‘No.’

‘Well then.’ John smiles down at him affectionately. ‘No wonder it’s still hurting. I can probably help you, you know. If you’ll let me.’

Sherlock scowls and avoids John’s eyes. He dislikes being condescended to. At the same time though he does feel uncomfortable about the lie he’s just told. Which is admittedly an unusual sensation. (Lie? Is it really a lie? His head does hurt. An understatement, then. He feels uncomfortable about the understatement he’s just made.)

‘It might not work,’ John says, spreading his hands to fend off the incoming dismissal. ‘But it can’t hurt to let me try. I might be a little bit drunk just at the moment but I’m still a bloody good doctor. Even when a bit drunk. Which I am.’

‘More than a bit,’ Sherlock sighs.

‘Only a very tiny bit more than a bit.’ John is smiling. Sherlock can’t honestly think of a good enough excuse to tell him to go away and leave him alone. Not while John’s smiling at him like that, being distracting.

‘Right, that’s a yes then,’ John rubs his hands together, businesslike. ‘Okay. First: paracetamol.’

He bustles over to the kitchen, coming back with a glass of tepid water and a blister pack of pills. He perches on the edge of the sofa, budging Sherlock’s legs back to make room.

‘Come on, sit up.’ Sherlock grudgingly obliges. John passes him the glass and pops two pills out into Sherlock’s cupped hand. He obediently knocks them back and takes a sip of water. ‘Good. Now, it was freezing cold in here when I first came back but you hadn’t done a thing about it. Have you got a temperature?’ 

Just as Sherlock is lowering the glass from his lips John presses his beautifully warm, slightly dry palm against his forehead. He is mostly impeded by hair, so he raises his right hand as well and gently combs the fringe away from Sherlock’s face, holding it back while he reapplies his left. Time, Sherlock is certain, freezes.

‘No,’ John says. ‘Quite cool in fact. That’s good.’

He releases his hold. His right hand travels gently back over the curve of Sherlock’s skull to the nape of his neck, while his left softly strokes down the side of his face. Just for a second Sherlock’s head is wholly cradled between John’s two small hands. His eyes close and he exhales deeply through his nose. Momentarily he is weightless. 

John’s touch falls away and Sherlock remains very still, trying to get his brain back online. John is evidently not so drunk that he fails to notice the pause.

‘Hmm, was that nice?’ There’s a smile in his voice and Sherlock wants to see it, so he opens his eyes.

‘Hi,’ says John.

‘Good evening.’

‘Hah. Yes.’ John grins down at his lap, then raises his eyes to Sherlock once again. ‘So, I think that having your head touched like that felt quite nice. To you, I mean. Specifically.’ He raises his left hand again, more tentatively this time. Very carefully, not touching Sherlock’s skin at all, he drifts his fingers through his hair, coaxing it back from his face and leaving a lovely stirring sensation along his follicles. ‘Is it a tension headache then? More outside than in?’

What to say? Sherlock’s head does truly hurt: he has been lying still for hours, cold, his neck at an unnatural angle, concentrating all his considerable brainpower on a gruelling mental exercise. Of course his head hurts. But to say that the headache is his primary concern would be significantly wide of the mark. He knows that he must go back and continue the work on his Mind Palace but at this precise moment he is too dispirited and John’s presence is so warm and so very welcome. He cannot bring himself to say the harsh words that would send him away, stomping off up to bed.

‘Yes. Tension, I think. Yes.’ He keeps his gaze steadily on the neckline of John’s pyjama top, not daring to look him in the eye. 

‘Okay then. In that case I know exactly what we’re going to do.’

John stands up from the sofa, a purposeful look on his face, and starts pushing the coffee table out of the way.


End file.
